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Google Gives Apple a Lesson in Showmanship

The Google I/O 2012 keynote began too soon, before a good half of the audience had found their seats. The 6,000 attendees were in danger of getting crushed on the escalators going in, in one of the poorest attempts at crowd control the Moscone Center has witnessed. The Wi-fi had been divided into two networks for attendees and press; both collapsed immediately.

And yet from that ignominious start sprung one of the most memorable keynotes the tech world has ever seen.

It wasn't that Google executives were particularly polished in their delivery, or Jobs-esque in their pacing and presentation. The Jelly Bean unveiling opened with a lengthy discussion of Linux kernel speeds and triple buffering; gravy for developers, to be sure, but hardly the headline from an otherwise impressive demo.

And yet, something else was clear from the start. There was less swagger on display than last year's Google I/O, which featured plenty of swipes at Apple (such as crowd-pleasing animations of ... an Android eating an apple).

Nobody mentioned (or animated) the A-word this year. They had less to prove, and more to simply show off.

Jelly Bean offered a number of features that appear to have Apple's next-generation iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS6, beat before it begins. Voice search seems more knowledgeable and faster than Siri. Google Now has transit directions and calendar integration — the practical upshot of which is it can tell you exactly when you should leave for your next meeting.

The much-touted Nexus 7 tablet was pitched modestly enough, and its $199 price tag was aimed squarely at the Kindle Fire customer. Google knows this is no iPad killer; in that price bracket, it doesn't need to be.

The Nexus Q, meanwhile, knocked Apple TV into a cocked hat. Yes, it's $299, a couple hundred bucks more expensive than its Apple rival. But when it comes to outfitting our living room or den set-up, many of us look less at price and more at what the device can do.

On the basis of these early demos, the Q has the kind of features you'd expect from Apple, not Google: it just works. Tap it with your Android phone or tablet to pair them up. Queue up songs or just hijack the DJ spot. It'll throw up cool visualizers on the screen, or restart that movie you were watching last night on someone else's Q, from the same spot.

If the Q takes off, it's especially bad news for Apple. Q users will be in a Google Play ecosystem, divorced from iTunes. It will make them more likely to chose an Android tablet or phone over iOS rivals.

And then, the grand finale, which came haphazardly and in the wrong place — again, this wasn't polished — in the middle of a Google+ demo. Sergey Brin bounded on stage and asked us if we wanted to see a Project Glass Demo.

Did we? You bet. The sci-fi glasses has been so shrouded in mystery that we only recently learned they operate via a trackpad. All of a sudden, though, we were seeing a Google+ Hangout through them — and not just any hangout, but one with a bunch of skydivers aboard that Airship Ventures zeppelin we wrote about, the Eureka, floating several thousand feet above downtown San Francisco.

What followed, as a nervous Brin noted, could have gone wrong in a hundred ways. Our hearts were in our mouths as the Project Glass team jumped out of the zeppelin, landed on the roof of the Moscone Center, did some vertigo-inducing BMX bike tricks off the side of the building, rappelled from the roof, almost missing the window-cleaner carrier below.

They biked into the hall, trailing parachutes, delivered a pair of glasses to Brin and received a standing ovation. And in that moment, the bar for tech demos was forever raised. As I said to a senior Facebook executive after the keynote: is Zuckerberg going to have to hang glide his way into the next f8 conference now?

The keynote ended with a whimper, as we concluded the Google+ demo that now looked painfully dull by comparison. But that didn't matter. Did it matter that the Project Glass frames would cost $1500 and only be available to developers in 2013?

Of course it did, but nobody cared. The tech geek fanboy in all of us was sold.

So hats off to Google for pulling off an unexpectedly stunning performance, and proving that a year is a very long time in the Android world. We hope Apple was taking notes, and that Cook can make his next product unveiling more sensational than this. If he can, we're in for one hell of a show.

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